


Virtue #4 -- Prudence

by NyteFlyer



Series: Virtues [4]
Category: Donald Strachey Mysteries (Movies)
Genre: Canon Gay Character, Drama, Gay Romance, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-21
Updated: 2010-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-13 07:39:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/134726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyteFlyer/pseuds/NyteFlyer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One basket of dirty laundry at a time....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Virtue #4 -- Prudence

Timothy J. Callahan may look innocent, but don’t let that fool you. Somewhere beneath that big, sweet smile and those friendly baby blues, that parish priest voice and that Brooks Brothers suit beats the heart of an evil, manipulative man. And nobody knows that better than I do. 

The insidious bastard took over my life without me even realizing it. Hell, he didn’t just take it over, he conned me into handing it over to him one basket full of dirty laundry at a time, and I did it willingly, joyfully even, because I figured out early on that if I wanted to have a life, a real life, not just the pissy, self-destructive existence I’d been leading up to that point, it had to be a life with Timmy in it.

He gradually eased me out of my world and into his own, a world of nutritionally balanced meals and dinnertime conversation, of Saturday afternoon chores and lazy Sunday morning sex. Talk about culture shock! But I adapted surprisingly well, and as the weeks passed, it got harder and harder to believe I’d ever lived any other way. Don Strachey, Gay Whore became Don Strachey, Solid Citizen -- respectable, domesticated, housebroken. We cuddled in front of the TV, did the dishes and shopped for groceries, attended social events and political functions. I bought a used tux and didn’t look half bad in it. He bought a couple of pairs of jeans and looked so good it made my balls ache. His friends became “our” friends, whether they wanted to or not. It wasn’t like Timmy gave them much of a choice. 

Most of all, he introduced me to the concept of having another person invested in my existence, of being invested in his, of knowing he loved me unconditionally and unselfishly and that I loved him, of seeing his interest in what I ate and drank and thought and did as a gift instead of an intrusion. 

Happy. Timmy made happy. 

I was twenty-five years old when Timmy and I met, but most days I felt at least twice that. I guess you could say he gave me a refresher course on how to be young. Everything was such a big deal to him, every dinner out, every kiss, every sunrise and every sunset. If I turned up with a $5.99 bouquet of daisies I‘d snagged for half price at the grocery because their petals were starting to drop, he acted like I’d brought him two dozen perfect roses, and when I held his hand at the movies or called him sweetheart, his smile lit up my world. 

He was like a kid at Christmas every day of his life, tearing through experiences like presents under the tree, jumping out of his skin excited to find out what was inside each box. In those early days, I wasn’t sure I had the stamina for it, to live in the shadow of someone who seemed to spend every second of his life in a full-speed-ahead rush. It took a lot of time and a major attitude adjustment for me to stop lurking in the shadows, to just close my eyes and hold on tight as he ripped open one box after another, taking me on what turned out to be the ride of my life.

Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? But Timmy balanced all that brain-rattling enthusiasm with the gift of silence, the capacity for peace. No matter how worked up I got, no matter how freaked out and frustrated and bouncing-off-the-walls infuriated the world made me, all it took was a few minutes with Timmy for all that negative shit to go by the wayside. He’d just sit there quietly, giving me my space and letting me rant, knowing with that spooky sixth sense of his when to ask a question and when to just keep quiet and let me yell. Then he’d reach out at exactly the right moment and reel me in, softening whatever blows life and the job and my own fucked up psyche had dished out with the lightest of touches. And once the touching started, I didn’t want it to stop. 

Timmy probably had a higher tolerance for touching than anyone on the planet -- not that I’m complaining. It just took some getting used to. Nobody in my family was much of a hugger or kisser, and since Kyle, I’d avoided all physical signs of affection like the plague. Even when I was out there whoring around, I’d always gone out of my way to keep contact to a minimum. If it wasn’t covered in latex, I didn’t touch it, let alone suck it or screw it. I kept my hands and my tongue to myself, and I let the guys I picked up know I expected them to do the same. I didn’t pet, I didn’t caress. Hell, I didn’t even kiss. So when Timmy blew into my life like the whirlwind he was, you could say I smelled change on the breeze.

After the initial shock of dating a human octopus wore off, I learned to enjoy living my life more or less velcroed to another human being. Enjoy? Hell, I came to depend on it, to crave it like I craved chili in football season, to need the feel of him next to me the way he seemed to need the feel of me. I’d become touch-deprived, see, without even realizing it. And from the first time he held me tight all night long without letting go even once, I knew I had some serious catching up to do. 

I’d slept with a lot of guys in my time, but I’d never actually _slept_ with them, you know? I thought it would be hard, at first, sharing a bed night after night with another man, that it would be awkward and suffocating, that I’d be too uncomfortable to sleep, worrying that I’d disturb him or that he’d disturb me. Turns out spending the night tied into a knot with Timothy Callahan was the most natural thing in the world. 

From the time we both worked up the nerve to say our first I-love-yous, we hardly ever spent a night apart. In those early days, I tried to stay away when I was working late, not because I didn’t want to be with him, because I did. He was becoming as necessary to me as oxygen, and I couldn’t breathe if he was out of my sight for long. But my schedule was erratic, my sleep patterns the next best thing to nonexistent, and he had to be at work at the ass-crack of dawn. Anything less than a full eight hours of shuteye left him bleary-eyed and bitchy, or worse, triggered a migraine. But he was also a worrier, and I knew without him having to spell it out for me that he didn’t sleep worth a damn until he was sure I was in for the night, that I was safe. Calling was a pain in the ass. It jarred him awake if he’d managed to doze off, and trying to make conversation at three a.m. when we were both sleep-deprived and pissy didn’t exactly lead to us whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears. 

So what the hell. I just started going over to his place as a matter of course, letting myself in as quietly as I could, shedding my shoes by the door and dropping my gun on the couch, undressing in the dark, then slipping under the covers and zeroing in on him like a heat-seeking missile, drawn unerringly to a warmth that went way beyond the physical. A lot of those nights, I came in frozen to the bone from sitting in the car for hours on end with no heat, radiating more cold than a block of dry ice. A guy with any sense of self-preservation would have gotten as far away from me as bed space allowed. Instead, the second I hit the sheets, he always rolled over, awake or not, and draped himself over me like a friendly blanket, deliberately covering my cold feet with his warm ones and guiding my hands up under his pajama top so they could defrost against his belly or his sides. 

We always fell asleep in a tangle, Timmy and me, but sometimes we’d shift during the night. I’d wake up, panicky and confused, because I couldn’t feel the weight of his arm around my waist or the moist heat of his breath against my face. Even if I could hear those hilarious little baby snores of his, even if it was getting light out and I could see him lying right there just a few inches away, I’d have to bridge that gap between us and lay a hand over his chest, gauging its steady rise and fall as I reassured myself that he was real and alive and most of all, mine.

“I’m here,” he’d mumble, catching my hand and pulling me close, anchoring me to the spot with a hairy leg thrown across my thighs. “It’s okay, baby. I‘m still here.” Five seconds later, he’d be out like a light, and I’d lie there just holding him, smiling indulgently as he drooled onto my collarbone, and wonder how I ever got to be so goddamned lucky. 

As the weeks went by, I gradually relaxed and found I was sleeping, really sleeping, for the first time since Kuwait, and I was doing it without having to down a fifth of Maker’s to get there. In spite of my growing addiction to Tim’s kick-ass martinis, I was drinking less and thinking a hell of a lot more clearly, actually giving a damn about my job and at odd moments when I least expected it, beginning to wonder if there might just be such a thing as happily-ever-after after all. I met his mother, Marion, when she drove up for lunch, made non-committal small talk with his father, the infamous and elusive Republican congressman, before handing the phone over to Timmy. Timmy casually mentioned the possibility of a family dinner, or maybe a weekend spent at his grandmother’s estate. I casually agreed that it would be nice. We looked at each other and smiled, knowing there was nothing casual about it.

We never had the big discussion about exclusivity, never made a big hairy deal out of defining the perimeters of our relationship or discussing that huge bugaboo in the gay community, whether or not to be monogamous. We just were. From that first dance in the moonlight, the only person I wanted touching me was Timmy, and I sure as hell couldn’t tolerate anyone else putting the moves on him. A time or two at the club, I almost got us tossed out for roughing up guys I’d tricked with in the past, first knocking their hands away and then slamming them into the wall when they tried to initiate an encore. And God help the guy who laid a finger on Timmy. 

One night, he excused himself to use the men’s room and was gone so long I started to worry. I found him wedged between a urinal and the stall, cornered and obviously freaked out, trying to fight off some cracked-out asshole twice his size who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Size ratio be damned, I lit into the big bastard and would have pounded him into hamburger if Timmy hadn’t jumped into the mix and pulled me off of him with surprising strength. 

“Let it go, Donald! I just want to get out of here!” he said over and over until I finally gave in and let him drag me away. Once we were in the car, he told me, his voice shaking, that the guy had been packing a knife. I literally saw red. Timmy’s a lover, not a fighter, but between you and me, he’s a helluva lot tougher than he looks. Still, it took everything he had to keep me pinned to the seat as he alternately reasoned with, threatened and begged me not to charge back in there and finish what I started. 

“It’s not worth getting cut up or worse,” he said. “I couldn’t live with myself if something awful happened to you because of me. For God’s sake, Donald, just let this go. Enough is enough.” 

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,“ I told him, forcing myself to sound more rational than I felt. He’d never seen me lose it like that before, and I think it scared him worse than being trapped and manhandled in the john. Hearing that degree of fear in his voice brought me back to my senses a little. “I want to die in your arms someday, sweetheart, but not tonight. You can let go now. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

The whole thing ate at me, though, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got. Before the next day was done, I’d found out who the guy was and where he lived, and had done enough research to know there were a couple of warrants floating around out there with his name on them -- something about forced entry and assault with a deadly weapon, if I’m remembering correctly, plus one that was drug-related. A whisper in the right ear had him arrested by nightfall and later extradited to Des Moines, of all the ungodly places. Last thing I heard, he was serving a stint in Anamosa, where I’m sure he learned exactly what forced entry was all about.

It was all neat, clean, bloodless. But if it had gotten bloody, that would have been okay with me, too. You don’t threaten Timmy -- my beautiful, kind-hearted Timmy -- with a knife and get away with it. Not if I have anything to say about it. 

People say I see Timmy through rose-colored glasses, but I don’t think that’s true. I know he has his faults. He’s a pathological neat freak, and when he goes into his nit-picking mode, it can just about drive me nuts if I let it. He’s also high-strung and a little bit of a hypochondriac, and he has an annoying obsession with Tuvan throat singers that I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. But why sweat the small stuff? Yeah, he can pile on the sarcasm when he gets in the mood, and God only knows he’s the most stubborn human being on the planet. But that’s all piddly shit when you weigh it against what a genuinely warm and accepting person he is. Too accepting, sometimes.

Tuvan throat singers aside, the one thing I‘d change about Timmy if I could would be the fact that he lets people walk all over him. I mean he‘s an incredibly intelligent guy, but he‘s carrying around a major deficit in the street smarts department. He takes everybody he meets at face value, always believing the best of them until something happens to prove him wrong. When that happens, it disappoints him too much, hurts him on such a deep level it drives me insane, makes me want to yell at him, “What did you expect, trusting an asshole like that?” and at the same time, makes me want to run out there and pound the shit out of the sorry piece of pond scum who let him down. I did the yelling thing only once, and the expression on his face shut me up immediately, sent me barreling into his arms to beg forgiveness for being such a self-righteous little shit and making him feel worse instead of better. As for the pounding part, let’s just say that most of his friends and acquaintances learned to treat him right, if not out of affection for him, out of fear of me. I know I earned my rep as a snarling guard dog early on, and I can’t say I put much effort into living that image down. It didn’t exactly add to my popularity, but it saved a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on my baby‘s heart, and that was just fine with me. 

Timothy and I are as different as night and day -- always have been and always will be. I’m a hyper-defensive pessimist with anger issues and a naturally suspicious nature. He’s a freaking gay Pollyanna who would give you the shirt off his back, then stand there with his mouth hanging open when you stole his pants and shoes as well. But you know what? I think that’s the reason we work together as well as we do. He’s got my back and I’ve got his. We watch out for each other, balance each other out. If he stumbles, he knows I’m gonna be right there to catch him, and that goes both ways. I take care of him, and he takes care of me.

In the three years I’d been living in my shithole apartment on the wrong end of town, my cheap-ass landlord had never gotten around to replacing the broken down washer and dryer in the laundry room with a set that actually worked. So once a month or so, whether I wanted to or not, I ended up wasting a rare Saturday morning off or a Sunday afternoon sitting in the coin laundry down the block, waiting for the industrial-size washer to take the crunch out of my dirty socks and turn them back to a shade vaguely resembling white. I hated it, of course, hated the inconvenience, the expense, the tediousness of it all. But what the hell? It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. 

Obviously, all that changed when I hooked up with Timmy. He usually had weekends off, so I made it my business to have them off, too, and I sure as hell didn’t plan on wasting them sitting in a cracked plastic chair beside some chick in curlers and a muumuu, listening to her squawk at her kids as they knocked over detergent while the dryers rattled and hummed. I wanted to be where Timmy was, even if that was just at home re-organizing his pantry for the third time in a month or clicking away on his laptop, editing a speech for his boss. I wanted to watch him, to hear his voice or the soft rustle of clothes as he moved around his apartment, to smell his cologne, to taste his smile when he caught me staring at him and grinned, pulling me in for a soft kiss. Most of all, I wanted to touch him, to feel him touching me, to lose myself in a horny rush as we tumbled to the couch, the floor, the bed in a tangle, grunting and grappling and suddenly frantic, marking our territory, staking our claim, each of us growling the same words over and over, time after time, until they became ritual. 

  
_Mine. You’re mine._   


So much for weekends at the laundromat. 

I’ve always been a low-maintenance kind of guy, domestically speaking. If I ran out of clean socks or shorts, I’d just swing by Wal-Mart for another six-pack and go on with my life. But it wasn’t long before I started running out of other stuff as well. Since Timmy’s apartment was bigger than mine and a lot nicer, we spent all our nights there, snuggled between his 600 thread count sheets and hand-stitched eiderdown comforter, snug as two bugs in that proverbial rug. Meanwhile, my place became nothing more than a drop-off point, a pit stop I hit every day or two to change or throw together an extra set of clothes for the next day. 

One Friday night after I’d picked Timmy up at the office, we stopped there on the way out to eat so I could grab a quick shower and a clean shirt. The only problem was, there wasn’t a clean shirt to grab. Or clean jeans, or clean anything else, for that matter. One tattered yellow tee hung from a bent wire hanger, the faded smiley face and fragmented lettering on the front of it reminding me that _Shit Happens!_ It happens, all right. But why does it always have to happen when your anal-retentive boyfriend is standing behind you, making disapproving clicking noises with his tongue?

“Donald,” Timmy began.

“Guess I’m spending tomorrow morning doing laundry,” I said, attempting to slam the closet door shut and spin to face him in one smooth motion. But he caught the door before it could close and held it in place, pinning me to the spot as well with a disapproving glare.

“Donald.“ This time, the name was nothing more than an aggrieved sigh. 

If you can’t impress ‘em, B.S. ‘em. I tried my best ingratiating smile. “Looks like we’re having a romantic dinner in tonight,“ I said, shooting for a delivery that was charming, upbeat, and oh-so-sincere. As the seconds ticked by, I got the hint that it had fallen flat. “Of course, if your heart’s set on an evening out, I can always wear my work clothes to the restaurant.“ 

Timmy eyed the tan button-down I’d tossed over a chair on my way to the shower. It was sweat-soaked and missing two buttons, and a rusty smear spread across one threadbare cuff. _Not my blood, for a change_ , I thought with a certain vague pride, rubbing the skinned knuckles of my right hand. _That’ll teach those scumbags to mess around with Donald Stra…._

“I smelled your work clothes for long enough on the ride over,” Timmy said firmly. “We need to do something about this mess now. This building has a laundry room on each floor, doesn’t it? We can order Thai and eat between loads.”

“The machines don’t work,” I said, surreptitiously trying to shove a crumpled pair of jeans under the bed with my foot. “I’ll have to haul a couple of loads down to the Wash’N’Wear in the morning.“ 

“Donald, you promised we’d go that interactive art exhibition at the Institute in the morning. This is the final weekend for it, and you’ve managed to wriggle out of going twice already. Here,” he said, pulling the _Shit Happens!_ shirt off its hanger and shoving it into my arms. “We’re going to gather up as much of this…this…” he stalled out, gesturing at the jeans I hadn’t quite managed to hide, the trail of toxic socks and boxers littering the floor, the mound of discarded shirts and pants and the occasional stained tie in the far corner. “We’re going to pull together as much of this… _landfill_ …as we can carry and take it over to my place. Honestly,” he breathed, dropping to his hands and knees to reach under the bed, pulling out jeans and more yellowed socks and God only knows what else, taking the time to scowl in disgust at each item as he threw it into a pile. “I don’t see how anyone can live like this.”

 _I wasn’t living,_ I wanted to tell him. _Not before I met you. I hadn’t been since the army, since Kyle_. But I just pulled the shirt over my head and knelt on the floor beside him. 

“Honestly,“ he said again. Then he caught sight of my face. His expression went soft and warm the way it does when I try to make him breakfast and incinerate the toast, or when I get in his way while he’s bustling around, being all industrious and productive, just because I’m a needy bastard and don’t like it when all his attention’s on something other than me. He smiled then, shaking his head a little and giving me a look that said I might be a fuck-up, but I was his fuck-up, and he loved me like crazy and wouldn’t have it any other way. His lips brushed mine. “Honestly,“ he whispered, pressing his forehead against mine for a just a moment before going back to work. 

Scared he’d throw his back out with all the bending and stretching, I dropped to my belly and crawled under the bed to snag a couple more pairs of stale boxers and handed them to him, laughing a little. Spelunking under my bed followed by a couple of hours of washing clothes as we scarfed down take-out wasn’t exactly the romantic evening out I’d planned for us, but if he was willing to put up with it, who was I to argue? 

We did three loads of laundry that night. Extra space magically appeared in Timmy’s overstuffed closet, so instead of piling my clean stuff into a basket, he put my shirts and pants on plastic hangers “so they can air out and avoid wrinkling,“ while my socks and shorts and wife beaters found their way into a drawer that he “never really used anyway.“ 

None of it ever saw the inside of my apartment again.

We returned to the scene of the crime a few days later, laundry basket in hand, and gathered another load for the wash. We rounded up a few other things as well -- a small stack of tapes we thought we might watch, a couple of books so I’d have something to read while he was working on the computer, a bag of apples from the fridge since they’d just go bad sitting there. Back at his place, my motley crew of tee shirts and sweats and no-name jeans declared squatter’s rights in his limited closet space, keeping company with all those high-end suits and silk ties. My bargain bin VHS tapes mingled with his meticulously categorized and alphabetized DVDs in the entertainment center, and my dog-eared paperbacks lay beside his signed hardcovers on the nightstand. After a while, you couldn’t tell where his stuff ended and mine began, which was okay with me. That’s pretty much how I felt about our lives.

As time went on, more and more of my things made that one way trip across town, until that seedy little furnished apartment was as bare as it had been on the day I’d moved in, stripped down to the bed and couch that had come with the place, the scratched television and VCR I needed to return to the rental store, a box of miscellaneous junk I’d decided to donate to Goodwill, and a couple of bags of trash ready for the dumpster. One night near the end of April, Timmy was going through the kitchen cabinets, looking for anything perishable that needed to be tossed. He turned to me, an unopened bottle of Maker’s Mark in his hand, and said, “Except for a few cans of ravioli and some baked beans, it looks like the cupboard’s bare. This is all you have left.”

“Hey, you found my emergency stash! I was looking for that during the ice storm, planning on drinking myself into a coma, I guess. But then you knocked on my door and I forgot all about it.”

“As I recall, I made you forget about everything. For days.”

“Best weekend of my life,” I said, sealing the trash bags with a twist tie and hefting them over my shoulder, ready to haul them downstairs. “Kinda weird, isn’t it? We haven’t spent a night here since.”

“No,” he said quietly, “no we haven’t.” From the way he was looking at me, I knew what was coming. I mean, come on, I’d known for a while where all this was heading, and I was more than ready for it. But we hadn’t talked about it -- we’d been pretty damned careful _not_ to talk about it, if you wanna know the truth -- and knowing he was about to put it into words, to formalize it and make it real, scared the ever-loving shit out of me. 

“Next Tuesday’s the first of the month,” he began, choosing his words carefully.

I nodded. Then what the hell, I decided to suck it up and take the plunge. “Rent’ll be due,” I said slowly.

“It seems a shame to waste money on that, since you’re never here anymore.” He watched me expectantly as I sweated bullets over the appropriate reply. When I didn’t answer right away, he squared his shoulders and looked me dead in the eye. “Maybe it’s time for you to think about turning in your key.” He hesitated, suddenly embarrassed, his cheeks coloring. “Of course, if you feel you need the space….”

“All I need is this,” I said, dropping the damned trash bags so I could burrow into his arms, hugging him fiercely. I heard a sigh of relief, felt him let go of the tension he’d been carrying around with him for God knows how long as he leaned into me, hanging on tight. We stood that way for a long time, not even kissing, just squeezing each other til our arms ached, holding on like we were trying to force our way into each other‘s skins through sheer pressure alone. 

“I wasn‘t sure you‘d say yes,” he said at last.

“I may be crazy, honey, but I‘m not stupid. You’ve got to let me pull my own weight, though. We’re gonna split the rent at your place, and I’m chipping in on the utility bill, groceries, whatever. I know you make a helluva lot more than I do, but this has to be an equal partnership. It can‘t be all one-sided.”

“ _Our_ place,” he said, looking so goddamned happy it made my chest flutter. “We’ll split the rent at _our_ place.”

“I’ve never done this before, you know.”

“Lived with someone? Neither have I. But we‘re spending all our time together anyway. Sharing expenses seems like the prudent thing to do.”

I smiled at his pet word. Everything with him was prudent this or prudent that, especially when he was in lecture mode, reminding me to pay a bill on time or to check the date on the O.J. before swigging it straight out of the carton. But making a life with Timmy? That was as close to prudent as I’d ever come. “Not just that. Done the plural pronoun thing, I mean. We, us, our….”

“Get used to it,” he said, giving me a smacking kiss before letting go and reaching for an empty box. “Why don’t you take out the trash while I get these canned goods ready to go to the food bank, then we can gather up the rest of this stuff and drop the key off on the way out. Oh, and this,” he said, nodding toward the bottle of Maker’s he’d left sitting on the counter. “You don’t want to forget this.”

I touched the red wax seal, remembering again that icy night back in February when I’d tried to drink myself into oblivion, scared to death of handing my heart over to Timmy but even more afraid of facing all the empty years ahead if I cut him loose. It seemed part of a distant past, one I didn’t particularly care to revisit.

“Leave it,“ I said. “The super can have it, or the next guy who’s unlucky enough to move into this dump. We’ve got enough to carry, and I don‘t need it anymore.” I looked up at him and damned if he wasn’t giving me that look again, that love-you-like-crazy look. My throat suddenly got so hot and tight I had to clear it and get busy with the trash bags, rechecking their ties and rustling them around to keep everything I was feeling from spilling out. 

He was staring at me hard by then, a worry line forming between his eyebrows. “You sure?“ he asked, reaching out to touch my cheek. 

I turned my head so I could kiss his palm, leaned my face into his smooth, warm hand. “I’m sure,“ I said, hearing the huskiness in my voice but no longer trying to hide it because hell, this was Timmy, and he’d cope. “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” 


End file.
